‘Pen15’ Co-Creator Sam Zvibleman to Adapt Anika Jade Levy Novel ‘Flat Earth’ for Vice Studios (Exclusive)

Vice Studios has chosen Pen15 co-creator Sam Zvibleman to adapt Anika Jade Levy’s debut novel Flat Earth, The Hollywood Reporter has learned. Zvibleman and Levy will co-write, with Zvibleman directing the pilot.

“Sam was at the top of my wish list. His work is distinguished by a sensitive male gaze and a sincere curiosity about the inner lives of women,” Levy said in a statement sent to THR. “There’s no one I trust more to translate Flat Earth to television.”

Zvibleman wrote and directed most of the Pen15 episodes for Hulu; Pen15, a comedy about middle schoolers “navigating the awkwardness of their teenage years,” was nominated for four Primetime Emmy Awards. Zvibleman directed full seasons of the CBC series The Neddeaus of Duqesne Island and Take My Wife for NBCUniversal.

Flat Earth is described as a “wry, sharply observed portrait of female ambition in New York at a moment when attention spans are at an all-time low and dopamine tolerance is at an all-time high. It follows two desperate young women — best friends Avery and Frances — as they navigate friendship, rivalry, obsession and survival in a city that perennially produces young, hot, brilliant women with curatorial level taste and then discards them when they’ve aged out of the proverbial pleated skirt.”

Our entry point is Frances’ experimental documentary, Flat Earth, which takes the girls on a cross-country road trip, where “red America and blue America begin to look like different brands of the same competing hallucination,” the description continues. “As Frances ascends in the art world, Avery flails financially and emotionally — and the nationwide Adderall shortage isn’t helping. She dates men who hate her, including a liberal law professor twice her age and a reactionary young artist, before eventually taking a job, out of desperation, at a right-wing dating app called Patriarchy and sliding into a series of increasingly transactional relationships.”

It doesn’t help when Frances simultaneously becomes famous and pregnant, leading to Avery’s unraveling.

Vice Studios recently made headlines for its coming adaptation of the video game franchise Payday, which THR exclusively revealed in March. Vice is currently in production on Gangs of London and will soon release feature film Bad Apples starring Saoirse Ronan. The studio will be expanding the Gangs of London franchise in the near future.

Zvibleman is repped by Iconoclast and Jackoway Austen Tyerman.

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